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“It was like a lion looking at his prey, that’s kinda what it looked like to me,” Benedict told the Tribune.

Other witnesses circled to help him as well, but his alleged attacker attempted to ward them off as Benedict screamed for them to help rescue him, he told the Tribune. When the attacker fled, others were able to help him get off the tracks, he said.

In a court hearing Tuesday, the lawyer defending Estep, Vadim Glozman, suggested police had misidentified his client as the suspect.

“I’ve seen the stills from the video, and they’re not very clear,” Glozman said, according to DNAInfo. “There’s no video of this happening, judge. We have a 34-year-old young professional who’s just starting off his career. He has absolutely no criminal history.

Estep lives with his wife and his dog in Wicker Park, a neighborhood in northwest Chicago, police said.

He graduated from Northwestern University with a Ph.D. in neuroscience in March 2017, Patch reports.

“Quite honestly, it’s a shame that Mr. Estep has to go through all this,” Glozman said, according to DNAInfo.